Splatfest Analysis (Part 1)

Splatoon 2 came out on the Nintendo Switch a couple weeks back, and they’ve had their first ‘Splatfest’ since the game was released. ‘Splatfests’ are worldwide events that pit two similar things against each other in an opinion poll (for this Splatfest it was Mayo vs Ketchup). After voting for your favourite, you’ll then be playing the game mode ‘Turf War’ against members of the opposite team, to determine which side is the best at Splatoon. I picked Ketchup, and I battled valiantly to prove that Mayo is bad and everyone who likes it deserves to lose at Splatoon.

During this Splatfest, I used Nintendo’s phone app to collect the data of my Splatfest matches in order to analyse my performance over the 24-hour event. I’ll be using this data for a multi-part analysis, covering a variety of sections like which weapons was I best with, what stages I was better at and more!

Today’s post will be covering whether I improved at the game throughout the Splatfest, mainly focused on correlation analysis.

Did I improve my performance during Splatoon 2’s ‘Splatfest’ event?

I wanted to check whether I had improved at all throughout the Splatfest – I did this by looking at my points scored, number of kills and number of deaths, and seeing whether any improved as I played more.

Looking at the correlation matrix and the P-Values for each of the options, most of my performance stayed relatively similar and the main reason my performance tended to vary was down to random chance, not me showing marked improvements or deterioration; apart from two things:

I actually got worse at covering turf the more I played with the Charger weapon type (shown by the highly negative correlation coefficient of -0.63). This wasn’t simply due to random chance (and was therefore significant), as its P-Value was below the Alpha value of 0.05.

I tended to die less the more I played. I had slightly negative correlation (with a coefficient of -0.27) between me playing more games in the Splatfest and the number of deaths I had. This was also not due to random chance, as the P-Value again was less than the Alpha value.

I could tell that both things were happening as I played. When I first started playing with the ‘Kelp Splat Charger’ I was having absolutely amazing games, often being top of my team’s scoreboard, but as I played with it more, and when playing during the second day of the Splatfest I could definitely tell my aim was getting worse and I was generally not playing as tightly as when I started. As the Splatfest went on I could also tell that I was slowly becoming more conservative in my play style; I felt that my team mates were always going in and dying constantly and I thought it would be best to generally stay back and make sure my team could super-jump to me (it rarely ever happened though… my team mates were playing like they had never played the game before, despite most being a similar level to me).

I also did a quick check to see whether points scored, number of kills and number of deaths all correlated, and it wasn’t really a surprise to see that as I scored more points I tended to get more kills and die less, but it’s nice to confirm it!